I think this discussion will get derailed if we start talking the criminal justice system (as distinct from the correctional system) or the legal system in general. the reason being, the United States and Great Britain have extremely similar legal systems, built on medieval English common law, while most of the Continental countries have a “civil law” with roots in the Code of Justinian and/or the Code Napoleone. So the debate ceases to be about American exceptionalism and turns into American/British exceptionalism.
Although the US legal system has its base in English Common Law, there are many differences that have developed because of differing social situations.
Although Engineer Don above quotes DNA testing, and it is in fact the case that the police should destroy DNA samples, in a recent case this was not done and the High Court let the conviction stand despite that. British Justice takes a ‘pragmatic’ approach to this (bending the law to fit justice) US Justice takes a legalistic approach and applies the law directly, using ‘the fruit of the poisoned tree’ test. Similar legal decisions have been made in Britain about the ‘reading of rights’, no Miranda here for sure- as long as the Judge is happy he/she can ignore some problems with the reading of rights.
The biggest difference is that there is no right to Jury trial in most offences committed and the government plans to curtail this right considerably. Additionally, two of twelve jury members can find someone innocent and the person will still be found guilty by the court. Additionally there is no longer any right to silence in England- if you don’t make a statement at each and any stage of the judicial process up to and including the trial, this can be held against you. Spouting ‘jury trial’ in England now has little meaning and will soon have less. This has been done in the interests of gaining more convictions. No one seems too worried about this!
A couple more possible explanations:
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We are a nation of immigrants, unlike most other countries. Immigrants who stay tend to have preferences for lower taxes but a weaker safety net. This argument fails since it doesn’t apply to other immigrant countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
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Our revolution, which was a humanitarian innovation that American nationalists can take pride in, was a revolution against a foreign power rather than a class. This leaves anyone who has had an elementary or secondary school education in the US with an instinctive suspicion of central authority. Arguments against “socialized medicine” or other extentions of the safety net thus have some built-in traction. This argument fails as well, since there a number of post-colonial powers. However, I don’t believe there are any other immigrant countries that fought a war to achieve independence.
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Societies that allow their citizens access to massive firepower combined with a deepseated sense of honor, as exists in parts of the South, are likely to be violent. Violence begats fear, fear begats punative sanctions.
Also, public opinion polls in foreign countries tended to support the death penalty at the time of its abolition. The exceptional aspect of the US is that its criminal law has tended to match (punitive) public preferences better than in other countries. Less deference to expert opinion may play a role here.
Interesting stuff. Wanted to comment on a couple/few things:
Legal Systems – {b]JTR**, amongst others, mentions this. Can’t see this as anything but a red herring in this debate. The practical differences between the US and other common law countries (such as the UK, Australia, NZ and Canada) are so minor as to be al but non-existent. Mainland Europe practices Roman Law but, again, the result is much the same. Law throughout Europe (including the common law UK version) is, in effect harmonised.
The US stands out on the death penalty issue not because the system itself is different in any way, it’s simply that the range of tariffs for serious offences is greater.
What may be different here – and I’m not sure about this – is that although the effect of common law is to state what you can’t do (you can do anything that is not expressly prohibited), the US Constitution takes reverse approach i.e. it states what an individuals rights are and the common law is then shaped in inverse fashion. An interesting dichotomy and the effect is worthy of consideration, IMHO.
Immigration as a factor – strikes me as an interesting idea. The US continued to absorb migrants for much longer and on a grander scale than any comparable country – especially after WW2. It might be argued that although Australia, NZ and Canada also continued to take migrants they all did so in a much more controlled fashion – often taking people with needed skills). As the UK is aware today, non-skilled immigrants are a burden on the Welfare State and will probably be such until the next generation grows up. It would make sense to think the waves of unskilled immigrants into the US prohibited any notion of a comprehensive welfare (safety) net. The burden would simply be too great and for too long.
On Health Care – this is really another debate entirely (and one we’ve been into fairly recently). I think what the rest of the first world is acknowledging by opting for universal health care is two things:
(1) A desire to have societies which are fundamentally inclusive i.e. every member is entitled to a prescribed list of basic rights (health care, minimum housing standards, education and health care on demand) that extend beyond the minimum (freedom of speech, etc), and
(2) The realisation that the free market does not work effectively and efficiently in all circumstances. Whether one agrees with this is a personal issue but the facts are fairly convincing (as Clinton and others agree). Something like 70% of the US enjoys comprehensive health care at an annual cost (in GNP) of 15%. Comparable countries cover 100% at a cost ranging from (approx) 8% to 12% GNP. Top clarify: 30% of the US population is not comprehensively covered – that is not acceptable in a modern society in the opinion of every country save the US.
Conclusion: As long as financial accountability is built into universal health care systems, they are efficient and are very considerably cheaper than the insurance alternative.
State vs. Fed Power – bumps point. Not sure if this is an important influence. Health Care, like for example Education, is a national matter – one can also include Housing, Gun Control and other areas that could be constitutionally affected if so interpreted.
Also, although in different kinds of relationships, all of Europe (through the EU), Australia and Canada are all in some form of Federation. The power to instigate a national Health Care policy clearly resides in Washington and part of Clintons original mandate was to explore that possibility. Hilliary might have blown it, but the power does rest with the President and Congress.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by London_Calling *
**The OP:
Please forgive me for re-entering this discussion so long after it has moved beyond my contribution/interruption of it, but I must pay you the apology I owe you for the remark to which you so correctly took exception. I offer no excuse, but as explanation I guess that I was embarrassed by what I’d written and akwardly tried to balance it out with an ill-conceived attempt at a humorous ending. I in no way meant to be dismissive of the OP’s question, nor belittle his right to speculate upon the philisophical differences in this world we share. I hope you both will accept my unqualified apology as well as my sincere observation of the fact that history holds few things more formidable than an Englishman with an informed opinion, nor anything more forlorn than anyone who would flout him.
No problem at all, Slithy Tove – although I did read your post (immediately above) anticipating a sting in the tail there was, of course, nothing to be discerned. Apology, I hope graciously, accepted.
“The realisation that the free market does not work effectively and efficiently in all circumstances. Whether one agrees with this is a personal issue but the facts are fairly convincing (as Clinton and others agree). Something like 70% of the US enjoys comprehensive health care at an annual cost (in GNP) of 15%. Comparable countries cover 100% at a cost ranging from (approx) 8% to 12% GNP. Top clarify: 30% of the US population is not comprehensively covered – that is not acceptable in a modern society in the opinion of every country save the US.”
First of all, the completely free market has never been tried.
Second of all, your 30% figure means nothing to me. Medicine…ready?..is a technology. Technology is expensive. It involves research, years of effort, multiple teams studying multiple aspects, etc etc. The average time for a single drug to reach the market is five years and millions of millions of dollars (source: my job). And you, well, feel it is a right to have that drug? To have all these people working for you? That’s not “fair,” that’s arrogant. It would be just as presumptuous, but more cost effective, to demand every citizen has a computer with a printer.
Not that I don’t hear that battle cry too; right now it takes the form of computer access for all schoolkids (but no porn, and no Orwell, and and and). However, there was either just a law passed or a law trying to pass in MA where all college kids can get a computer…that is, if they can’t afford it the laptops (!) will be subsidized. What the fuck is that? Those poor kids can’t afford laptops…boo-hoo. Neither could Einstein, Shakespear, Euler, Newton, Sophocles, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes…and yet, all these people learned more in their life than half our college kids do (since about 40% drop out within the first two years, see?).
Thanks for taking my money away and flushing it down the drain. I’m sure I couldn’t have found a better use for it.
In addition to previously advanced valid points (i.e. the tradition of mistrusting centralized authority), I think the impact on the Old World of immigration to the U.S. should not be overlooked. Many of the people who made the journey were iconoclasts, free-thinkers and people generally “on the make” who wanted to get out from under rigid class distinctions, fossilized political systems and lack of opportunity for economic advancement. Their coming here contributed to America’s acceptance of greater opportunity in exchange for a more porous safety net; the loss of these people left Old World countries more accepting of the idea of government as a safe if somewhat strangling protective blanket.
From what I can see, the great majority of Americans don’t care very much that Europe (for example) does things differently. We have long collective memories of the messes we escaped from and that America has helped bail Europeans out of (not to mention the dreaded dangling preposition). :eek:
Aynrandlover, if you want to argue the merits of different systems of healthcare, you might want to start a new thread, or resurrect this one http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=46426.
But it does worry me that the fact that 30% of your nation doesn’t have access to decent healthcare means nothing to you.
Actually, I would turn that on its head. I don’t think the typical U.S. citizen has much memory of what has happened, at all. (And I’m not slamming the educational levels of the citizens or the educational system.)
The U.S. has built up its own mythology (forming its own self-perception) in despite of history. It begins with “memories” of “No Taxation without Representation” despite the fact that even our pathetic high school history books note that the colonies did not have much less representation than the average British citizen and at least a few of the textbooks note that all those “oppressive” taxes were levied to recoup the cost of defending the colonies from France in the war ending in 1763. The list of “memories” that differ from factual events is a long one, extending from such serious issues as the origins of the war for independence to such trivial issues as the 1970s penchant for equating the “independence” truckers with the “independence” of cowboys in the Wild West–despite the fact that most cowboys were stolid “ride for the brand” types who often worked in quiet feudal obedience to their bosses.
My guess is that all the differences noted above have more to do with the way that we have created our mythology–and that probably comes back to two sources: immigration when it happened combined with “manifest destiny.”
There are many countries who have experienced massive immigration in the later part of the 20th century. However, most of those countries were originally colonized, settled, and grew to a level of maturity with basically monocultural immigration. Canada and Australia have accepted non-British immigrants throughout their history (more Canada than Australia in the early days), but they simply did not get that many immigrants to begin with and the overwhelming number of the immigrants prior to 1945 were British. (In 1960, Canada’s population was only twice the size of Michigan, yet Michigan, alone, had several times the number of first and second generation immigrants that Canada had.)
Britain, The Netherlands, France, and Germany have all experienced increased immigration beginning around 1960 and stepping up after 1980. The cultures of those countries are hundreds of years old. Immigration certainly has an effect on how they will change through the 21st century, but it has had little time to create change in each nation’s approach to law and economy in less than 40 years. Japan still has no immigration.
If you’re looking for reasons why the U.S. seems to have gone in a totally different direction, consider this.
The U.S. has been accepting large numbers of multi-cultural immigrants beginning soon after its creation as it expanded across the continent (my oldest landed ancestors were Irish settlers in the wake of “the '98”–that’s 1798). Germans were arriving in significant numbers almost as soon. By the time of the Civil War, a number of Scandinavian and Eastern European countries had begun sending over their more restless spirits. At the same time, an attitude developed within those already here that the breadth of the continent was “ours” by right of “manifest destiny” to be taken and held and used to “our best interests.”
Between British monoculturalism* and a smaller population, Canada and Australia did not have the riot of ideas and conflicting cultures found in the States. Without the “manifest destiny” myth (and with far more hostile environments to overcome), the Canadians and the Australians did not fill up their whole landmass with people right away. This meant that the stabilizing influences that emanated from the established cities continued to have a greater hold on the society at large. (A number of “wild” ideas originated out in the frontiers in the U.S., everything from allowing women to vote to allowing drivers to turn right on a red light (once the traffic has cleared).)
(*Yeah, I know Canada got some Germans out on the plains–but they stuck to themselves and didn’t create a cultural mêlée the way that the Irish, Italians, and Poles battled it out with the “native born” in the States).
The one region that had the opportunity to develop in the same manner as the U.S. was South America. Many of the South American nations were hampered in establishing a stable government because Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule differed so drastically from British. The British colonies were largely self-governing for day-to-day matters by 1776. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies were often ruled by an autocratic governor right up until he was forced to flee between 1815 and 1821.
However, while Brazil remained more or less monocultural, Argentina in the 19th century enjoyed or suffered many of the same issues of immigration and expansion as the U.S. did. I am not sure how much of Argentina’s problems through the latter half of the 20th century were simply “what happened” vs how much was the result of either/both the colonial legacy or the several intra-continental wars that South America suffered throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
However, it would be interesting to compare Argentina and the U.S. around 1910 - 1930 to see whether Argentina’s approach was more “European” or more “American” at that time.
Excellent, thoughtful thread, everyone. I find little to disagree with in most posts here.
I’d like to add a few more wildly-stereotypical factors to consider (of course).
“Rugged individualism” - as has been alluded to already, the US has a sort of national myth, born of the immigrant spirit, of the strong, enterprising individual being the source of all success, despite all evidence of collective activity being a fairly strong force too. Even the Declaration of Independence and Constitution refer more to citizens’ rights than responsibilities. That tends to lead to a lower regard for any feeling of responsibility to each other - someone less fortunate is more likely to get blamed than helped. It seems to me we’ve had a resurgence of that recently, and I agree it’s ugly.
Sheer scale - the US may be better thought of as a continent than a nation. Most individual states are larger, in area and often population, than most of the European countries the OP refers to. Add to that the hugely greater ethnocultural heterogeneity they also have, and a feeling of community is just harder to create in the first place.
Jingoism - Source is in relative geographical isolation, allowing other countries and their societies to remain distant abstractions. There’s a common but ugly train of thought to the effect of “We keep bailing those guys out of wars, they can’t handle their own affairs as well as we can, so just because they’re doing something doesn’t make it right, in fact maybe the opposite.”
Isolation (Part 2) - The European approach may be self-reinforcing. It would be hard to have very different approaches from your literal next-door neighbors if they’re about the same size or larger. If you cut, say, Belgium loose and separated it from the rest of the world by 3000 miles, it might wind up as different from the rest of Europe as the US is.
Tomndebb referred to Canadian and Australian immigration policy as being just as open, but I thought differently. I understand that Australia had what was actually called the “White Australia” policy up until the 1950’s, basically banning all non-Europeans from any immigration. It’s totally opposite now, but it hasn’t been in place for long. Canada’s experience with true multicultural acceptance doesn’t go back much further either, I understand.
Differences in Canadian and Australian views toward collective responsibility may well have more to do with their political heritage being shaped by Britain, even though culturally they’re both much closer to the US. In Canada’s case, the national political heritage (such as it is anymore) is also shaped by its origins with the Loyalist refugees who formed much of its early population. That heritage, bluntly based on collective responsibilities rather than individual rights, may tend to lead to a smug counter-jingoism against the US and everything it does. Australia has its own heritage of “mateship” left over from its own colonists and frontier history (and present), that naturally leads to socialized medicine etc.
Disagreements welcome, btw - I’d welcome enlightenment.
This was where I was heading. I am not familiar with the restraints Canada and Australia may have imposed on immigration, but I knew that, realistically, they did not have multicultural immigration in any great degree during their formative years. I do know that Canada had sizeable German, Italian, and Russian Jewish immigrant communities before the 1930s, but “sizeable” was a relative term and those groups had no similar impact on the national consciousness in the way that those and dozens of others had on the U.S.
There really are two (interdependent) issues here: in what ways does the U.S. differ from the rest of the old “first world”; and how much (and in what ways) do those differences arise from national “characters” or “personalities”? Most (not all) of the discussion had addressed the various specific differences, but I had interpreted the OP to be a question of “Where did the differences arise?”
I’d like to add some clarification (I hope) about the US attitude towards the rights-and-responsibilities balance (and I believe any adult would admit that both are necessary and must be balanced). The national mythology, for lack of a better word, is based on a rebellion against central authority. The most potent symbols, especially the Constitution and Declaration, represent individual rights against the government, but the responsibilities that come along with citizenship are abstractions.
US children get taught in school about their national history and heritage, and the symbols that are used reinforce a sense of entitlement to rights. Meanwhile, the abstract responsibilities side doesn’t take hold as well without counteracting symbols. And face it, children are more interested in their rights than their responsibilities, anyway.
Actually, going back to the OP, I’d question one aspect of it:
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if America is any more likely to be "different in many of its basic assumptions " than most other countries are. If we look at Europe, for example, there’s vast difference in national outlooks between very similar countries.
Reply to Gary Kumquat:
Throughout Western Europe, Canada, Australasia:
No death penalty
Comprehensive free (or highly subsidized) at the point of use health care.
Comprehensive welfare provisions that avoid a great deal of outright destitution.
Far fewer people imprisoned
Free speech considerably more limited.
More strict control of guns.
Less separation of church and state
Greater controls on business and commerce
Less separation of powers- overlap between Executive, Legislature and Judiciary.
These are all major issues
The main difference (aside from ones of everyday culture and taste) are a division between Roman Law and Common Law Countries, but that is a different debate.
From the point of view of someone who was born in Britain, educated in the USA, and have lived outside the USA since I was offered an all expenses paid vacation in Viet Nam in the early seventies, I find that the underlying belief and experience in all countries listed above is more different from the USA and similar to each other.
As I said in the original post, this implies no preference for either side. I am quite happy to argue with my American friends about the shortcomings of their system, and with my non-American friends (including British) about the short-comings of theirs.
The fence may not be a comfortable seat, but it is a rewarding one.
To Pjen’s reply to Gary K, I’ll add:
1)The US has a tendency to settle many of its problems through its courts rather than through a set of regulators.
and
2) The US has somewhat more aggressive antitrust provisions. Europe tends to follow our innovations in this area.
On (1) that may be related to the US’s conceptualization of problems boiling down to “rights”. (Nice post, btw ElvisL1ves.) Some of it may relate to our lack of guarenteed health care. A person who is a victim of an accident in the US will often find a sympathetic jury, since they sense the sort of financial burdens that person is likely to face. In Europe, multimillion dollar product liability judgements are much rarer.
On (2) this may relate to the US’ suspicion of central authorities, except in this case the large, faceless organization happens to be a corporation rather than big government.